Building a Brand with YouTube

YouTube is a tremendous platform for the casual vlogger as well as large companies to get their voices heard and put material out. Whether you are a solo artist making music in your bedroom studio or the CEO of a powerhouse looking to build your company’s name even further, visual content is an absolute plus. We came up with a couple ways that you can read about below.

Branding

YouTube provides excellent layouts and themes to optimize your YouTube channel for visitors. Upload your own theme and brand colors that will be presented to every visitor who clicks on your videos. We’ve all seen different musical bands and video game companies with gorgeous YouTube layouts that look remarkably different from the standard Youtube layouts we’re used to.

YouTube also allows you to create a channel description of your company mission and to highlight videos you wish to promote on your channel homepage. If your business possesses multiple channels than you can choose to present featured channels that you wish to promote to visitors. If you enable browse view, you can also present a channel trailer to create leads for unsubscribed viewers who visit your YouTube channel.

Building out a video library is a great way to increase engagement among users. Your video channel and featured videos will be displayed on a user’s homepage who interacts with your brand enough. Building out your video library will also increase the chances of one of your branded videos appearing in the related videos section, instead of a competitor’s.

Topics for Engagement

Video presents an alternative medium to discuss topics that just don’t generate enough organic traffic or social media shares in a written format. Consult your social listening software to discover topics that people in your industry niche are discussing. Quora is an excellent source to discover the most popular questions people are asking in your niche.

Consider using Buzzsomo or Google Trends to discover what topics are trending the highest over search and social media. This will provide great insight into topics for “how to” videos that can be more easily understood through a visual format. Consider using videos to conduct listicles; think of Letterman’s infamous “Top 10s” that dominated late night talk shows. Use these resources to discuss topics that are important to your consumers and present them in a visually appealing format that will encourage them to share with others who have the same concerns.

Optimizing Your Youtube SEO Campaign

Keywords

While Google’s RankBrain has systematically disavowed keyword strategies in place of semantic search, keywords still remain important for YouTube rank. Keywords do not only signal to YouTube the thematic relevance of your content to a user search, they also give you access to rank your video’s in a Google SERP.

Publisher’s can target keywords specific to ranking in a YouTube search or video keywords across Google that bring traffic to your YouTube page. Use your keyword planner software to discover keywords that possess a high YouTube CPC, but drives immeasurable traffic from Google itself.

Long-tail keyword phrases perform the best over YouTube as you will rarely rank highly for a broad or exact match keyword alone. Investigate what keywords your competitors are ranking for and observe. What keywords are their titles and descriptions optimized for? What is the length of their video and what sort of engagement ratio is it generating based on the number of views and subscribers the channel possesses? Ask yourself, how can I optimize for this keyword?

Titles

Content published over YouTube should utilize targeted keywords directly in the beginning of your title-tag. Title-tags should read naturally and possess a sort of hook or CTA for users to click on your video. For example, if you are publishing content about WordPress how to’s, one title that would fit would be “Top Yoast SEO Plugin Tips for WordPress- Instant Results Guaranteed!” This title utilizes a long-tail keyword phrase directly at the start of the title and entices users to click through who are truly interesting in optimizing their WordPress website.

Your title-tag will represent one of the clickable hyperlinks users can click on. Titles should seek to persuade users to click on your video and watch as long as possible.

Decsription

YouTube descriptions will be the first item users consult before actually playing your video. The longer the video description the better. This allows you to include as many relevant keywords as possible to rank for. This also allows YouTube to semantically index and rank your video based on these keywords.

Ideally, you’ll want to include your main keywords within the first sentence of your description. Your keywords will represent what users are searching for in a YouTube query and reassure them they clicked on the right video they are searching for. From there, include a brief yet specific description of what your video is about, without revealing too much information that would leave a user satisfied without needing to click on your video.

Include a hyperlink to your native website at the beginning of your video description. Also include links to your social media accounts at the end of the description to encourage further engagement with your brand.